yoga on bike with wine fumes

Yoga on Wednesday night. No bike involved. I'm glad I had worked on my legs getting them relaxed a bit. F had us working on leg stuff, and hooooooolllllllllllllllding the poses. I'm not a big fan of Thunderbolt, it just kills my quads, and I used to be able to do it all the time. In fact, I could spread my feet a bit, and get my butt firmly on the ground. Not anymore.

Thursday swim, in the 50 m pool. Feeling a bit creaky, only in the water a half hour. Don't really want to talk too much about this one.

Good stuff happened Thursday afternoon.

I was looking for a good strong bike session on Friday. And got it, along with lots of other stuff. I had started a wine kit a couple days ago, and there is a lovely pre-wine smell in the basement. Very nice. Once on the bike I started with 15 min warmup. For some reason, even when my legs are tired, I'm getting into a bike groove fairly quickly. There have been times when it's taken me 45 minutes to be able to pedal 85 rpm.

1.5 hr at the top of endurance pace. Standing fairly often, as my butt wasn't so happy about my pants today. Not sure why. Spent some time on the drops, and here's where the yoga comes in. One of the things I had to learn to do in yoga before bending or twisting was to lengthen my spine. I have crap posture, though it's better now. I'm always having to think about lengthening my spine before doing stuff.

So there I was spinning away, on the drops, thinking about how much less my thighs are doing the thwap thwap thwap against my tummy. Or vise versa. Much better than it used to be. For some reason I though about my back posture. I stretched out, flattening my back a bit, trying to move my head away from my hips but without scrunching my shoulders up to my ears. That felt sort of odd, so I paid attention to it for a few breaths, thinking about what felt different. Then when I looked at the computer I was putting out 10 watts more.

I did this a few times during the ride, trying to lengthen my spine and use the extra space to breathe, and every time my watts went up. The only problem is that my bike fit isn't quite right for that change. I might have to drop the nose of my saddle a tiny little bit. Very interesting.

Then I ramped up to the top of tempo pace for 30 minutes. That felt pretty good, though towards the end my right quad was beginning to talk to me a bit. I cooled down and stopped at the 2.5 hour mark and did a good stretch session, especially working on quads.

I'm pretty happy with the workout. One odd thing is that about an hour into the endurance part, I essentially stopped sweating. After starting I had gradually started to sweat and ended up being pretty wet. I'm not sure why at the same effort I wasn't sweating anymore, or hardly at all. The water and a Nuun mixture in one bottle were being powered down, 3 bottles in 2.5 hours. Then when I picked up to tempo pace I started sweating again, but not as much as starting at endurance pace.

Does anyone have any insight about that sweaty issue in the last para there?